Pages

Monday, 7 June 2010

Teaching Grammar Through Songs

I have to admit that I find teaching grammar a bit on the boring side and finding good examples of grammatical structures in interesting authentic text can be quite time consuming, so when I saw this lyrics search tool Lyreach I was instantly impressed.

All you need to do is type in an example of your grammar structure and you can then find it in a whole range of different song lyrics.

This links to the lyrics start to show beneath the search box as you type, and then you just click on the sentence to link to the correct verse from the song. You'll see the part of the song highlighted and there's a link to a clip from Amazon.

Unfortunately the clip is only the start of the song and may not have your grammar example in, but it is easy from hear to find the clip on YouTube or find the clip and the rest of the lyrics together using a tool like Tubeoke that matches clips to lyrics.

So now using these two easy tools you can find lots of authentic examples of your grammar points in song lyrics and create quick activities based around them. You could even paste the lyrics from the verse into Wordle and use it as a prompt to get the students to drill, memorize or review the verse after they listen.

You can do similar things to that with http://www.googlebattle.com and compare the use of say "I have" with "I am" and get links to the results in Google that help you find answers (a little like a concordancer). The problem is that it doesn't specifically give you songs. It's still quite an informative tool though. I wrote an article about it a while back at:http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2008/11/tool-for-comparing-words.htmlComparing the frequency of use and context can be pretty interesting.